Monday, June 13, 2016

Orlando

I learned about the news of the mass killing in a gay bar in Orlando in a text from my partner
on Sunday morning. I had been out the night before with a friend and stayed at
his house. I immediately got on Facebook and wrote, “Devastated and disgusted.
I regret the day I came back to this hell hole country.” A bit dramatic in
retrospect, but it is what I felt at that moment. When you live outside of gun
culture for four years and then step back into it, it is jarring to say the
least. I grew up around guns, I have fired guns, and I even owned a gun once. I
don’t have a problem with guns, but I do have a problem with people who
fetishize gun ownership. And I do have a problem with people being able to buy
assault rifles like the one used to kill (mostly) gay Latinos on Sunday morning
in Florida. Every time one of these events happens, we say something's gotta
give. But as others have already pointed out, if killing little kids in an
elementary school didn’t change anything about America’s gun access laws, then
nothing ever will. It is insane.

The first time I set foot inside of a gay bar was the week before
my seventeenth birthday. It was the summer of 1984. The moment I crossed the threshold, my
world opened up. Every queer person I know, has a coming out song, mine is
RELAX by Frankie Goes to Hollywood. To this day, when I hear that tune, I’m
transported back to the Carousel in Knoxville, TN. Like most gay bars in
smaller cities, the Carousel’s clientele was a literal cross section of the
rainbow—dykes,
daddies, lipstick lesbians, bears (we didn’t call them bears then though), drag
queens, old queens, pretty boys, and muscle boys.

We danced. We drank. We hooked-up. We pretended our friends weren’t dying
and life was beautiful.

Since that time 32 years ago, I can’t count the times I have
been on a dance floor in a gay bar at 2AM in the morning, intoxicated on booze
and house music, or high on e or poppers, rubbing against bodies, kissing. It
is euphoria. That was the state the victims were in when the gunman opened
fire, turning pure pleasure into terror in a microsecond. The safest place for
them destroyed. They were supposed to be hit with laser beams, not
bullets.